Military budgeting has come to fascinate me. In the 1690s, during the war between Britain and France, the process might typically go something like this, as I understand it:
1. During the winter of any given year, William III asks Parliament to fund x number of men. It is fairly easy to work out how much this costs.
2. Parliament grumbles and funds x-y, voting on this say in January.
3. The monies are paid out, now that there's Parliamentary authority.
4. The troops are in the field by (say) June.
For that kind of thing, essentially revenue spending, an annual budget process is adequate (though William III didn't like it, for various reasons). But military spending on kit, especially warships (and latterly aircraft), is by definition capital-led and usually requires multi-year programmes. Difficult to arrange when Parliament (or equivalent) likes to revisit the Estimates every year.
So my question is this: what are the examples of multi-year budgeting (in countries where the legislature gets to vote, i.e. not in countries without meaningful parliamentary accountability) for defence procurement? Off the top of my head I can think of a few cases where this sort of thing happened, or seems to be happening now:
1. The 7-year military budgets demanded by Bismarck in the 1870s or thereabouts - this was a major political issue at the time.
2. The multi-year budgets given to the Royal Navy to build battleships in the late 19th century (I'm a bit hazy about this).
3. The long-term procurement plans of the US Navy post-1945 - the USN seems to be able to get a new aircraft carrier delivered on a drumbeat, i.e. at regular intervals, every few years. How does this square with an annual Congressional budget process?
And as an extension: how well does multi-year budgeting work in practice? If it works better, why doesn't it happen more often?